JA Bayona's THE IMPOSSIBLE Smashes Box Office Records

Juan Antonio Bayona has outdone himself. Bayona's debut feature, The Orphanage, already stands as one of the great successes of recent Spanish film, drawing nearly four and a half million admissions at Spanish cinemas alone. And now his follow up? Disaster picture The Impossible? Well, that one has just smashed previous Spanish opening records by drawing 1.4 million admissions on just 633 screens in only four days. To put this in context, only six Spanish films have managed to match The Impossible's four day totals over their entire runs in the past five years. The hugely popular [REC] films, incidentally, are not among them. That's just huge and a very necessary boost for the local industry at a time when government supports are being drastically reduced and eliminated.